Portable electronic devices are commonly used for communication and entertainment purposes. Portable electronic devices include devices such as smartphones, cellular phones, mobile communication devices, computers, portable computing devices, mobile computing devices, tablet computers, cameras, video players, smart watches, audio players, electronic media readers, two-way radios, global positioning satellite (GPS) devices, and/or other types of electronic computing or communication devices, including combinations thereof. As these types of devices have become ubiquitous, the number of features included in them has increased. At the same time, users have become more reliant on these types of devices and user's expectations regarding the functionality of these types of devices continue to increase.
A software assistant is included in some electronic devices. The software assistant improves the ability and efficiency with which users can request information from the device, command the device to perform an action, and/or otherwise interact with the device. It has become more common for users to initiate requests and interactions with devices through voice commands or requests. Typed entry can be inefficient or inconvenient because some portable electronic devices have relatively small keyboards which may be inefficient for users to type on and/or because it is simply more convenient for a user to speak the request than to type it or enter it into the device using another method. As users become more comfortable with interacting with devices using voice commands, there are situations where issuing a voice command may not be possible or may not be desired. These situations include: circumstances in which the device is too far away to press a button on the device to start a voice command process, circumstances in the which the device is too far away to effectively receive a voice command, circumstances in which the ambient environment is too loud for the device to effectively receive a voice command, circumstances in which the user is unable to or does not want to touch the device, circumstances in which a microphone of the device is covered, and/or circumstances in which the user wishes to make little or no noise.
Furthermore, while it may be technically possible to invoke various features of an electronic device by sending a command to an application running in the background on the device, many devices and/or operating systems limit the operations that applications, particularly background applications, are able to invoke. Therefore, a software application, or app, running in the background may not have the ability to initiate certain processes or functions on the device even though a voice assistant or software assistant may have broader permissions to do so. Therefore, a user may have the most flexibility in making requests to the device through voice commands. However, actual voice commands may be inconvenient, impossible, or undesirable for any of the reasons discussed herein.
Improved apparatuses, methods, systems, and techniques for triggering verbally invokable actions or requests on a portable electronic device, without producing audible sounds, are provided herein.